10 Best Plugins For WordPress in South Africa

If you are looking for the best WordPress plugins for your business or your projects, there are over 59,000+ you can choose from.

Plugins help in extending the functionality and features of your WordPress-based website. If you are a small business owner in South Africa, these plugins also help in ensuring your small business website is more secure.

We have come up with a list of the 10 best WordPress Plugins you can use for your business or other projects in South Africa.

#1. Akismet

Akismet is a comment spam filtering plugin for WordPress. It goes through the blog comments and filters out spam using its algorithms. When several sites start to report similar-looking content as spam, then Akismet will learn to identify that kind of content as spam in the future.

Akismet saves you hours since it automatically catches spam comments before they land in your moderation queue as pending. This allows you to focus on moderating comments by real users.

Messages marked as spam do not show the Awaiting Moderation notice like the other comments. Instead, they are automatically moved to the spam folder. Akismet is a must-have plugin if you are running a blog or you have allowed people to comment on your site.

Top Features of the Akismet plugin

Akismet can differentiate between real and spammy comments.
It automatically filters out Spam Comments for you.
The plugin scans URLs found in the comments and blocks comments with misleading links.
It automatically discards spammy comments saving your disk space.
The plugin is free for Personal use.

#2. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is a WordPress plugin that improves your website’s rankings on search engines, by helping optimize your website’s content and keywords. Most of the Yoast SEO functions are automated but your input and some planning are still needed. SEO is very vital for the overall performance and ranking of your website on Search Engines. Yoast SEO is a must-have SEO plugin for your WordPress website. With Yoast SEO, you can manage technical stuff such as Meta Tags, Keywords, and Readability scores among many others. It helps you identify SEO-related problems so you can fix them easily.

Top Features of the Yoast SEO plugin

Yoast SEO automatically creates SEO Breadcrumbs on compatible WordPress themes.
It analyses your Pages and Posts to identify any SEO-related issues.
It automatically identifies the readability of your article and gives you a score. This helps you write for targeted audiences.
Yoast SEO has built-in XML Sitemaps which update automatically.
It allows you to write Custom Meta Tags or use a template for all the pages and posts,
It helps you avoid duplicate content by using canonical URLs.

#3. Woocommerce

WooCommerce is an open-source eCommerce plugin for WordPress which is designed for both small and large-sized online merchants using WordPress.

With WooCommercenplugin, you can sell physical and digital products. Your customers get to create an account on the website and purchase any services or products that you might offer. WooCommerce is the best choice if you want to sell products and services on your business website in South Africa.

Core Features of WooCommerce

WooCommerce is a 100% free plugin that is owned and maintained by Automattic the same company behind WordPress.
Woocommerce is super extendable since there are many free plugins to extend its features.
You can sell a physical products, digital products, services, memberships, and subscriptions with Woocommerce. The plugin also allows you to create a product with an affiliate link.

You can as well use the Easy Digital Downloads plugin if you want to stick with digital products only.

#4. Site Kit by Google

Site Kit is the official WordPress plugin from Google for insights into how internet users find and use your site. It is one of the best WordPress plugins developed by Google.

You can check your insights and reports right from your WordPress dashboard by connecting Google Services with the Site kit plugin.

Site Kit is popular for being the best choice for connecting your WordPress website to Google Analytics.

Top Features of the Site Kit by Google plugin

It connects your website to several Google Services.
It also integrates your WordPress website with Google Analytics and gathers key analytics,
It can connect to Google’s Tag Manager,
It allows you to check your marketing performance by integrating your WordPress website with Google AdSense.
It can connect to the Google Search Console (Formerly Webmaster Console).
It provides Page Speed Insights.
It supports Google Optimize.
It displays all vital statistics inside one WordPress Dashboard so you won’t have to visit multiple Google websites.
It’s completely free and easy to manage.
You can analyze your whole website or a single post or page.

#5. Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 is a free and most popular Contact form plugin for WordPress. The custom shortcode for each contact form you create makes it easy to add your contact forms to any post, page, or widget area.

You can extend Contact Form 7 plugin functionality using other third-party plugins. The plugin is also compatible with almost all WordPress themes that follow WordPress best practices.

Top Features of the Contact Form 7 plugin

It’s free and easy to use.
It’s compatible with all themes you find in the WordPress directory or any other paid themes you may have purchased,
You can extend it with other third-party plugins. You can add conditional logic, accept payments with Stripe and PayPal, and many others.
You can integrate the Contact Form 7 plugin with the Akismet plugin, Google ReCaptcha, and other email marketing services.

#6. WP Fastest cache

WP Fastest cache is a simple and easy WordPress caching plugin. It has a free version that does its job incredibly well. If the paid option is out of your budget, the free version is a great alternative.

Caching usually happens when your browser saves a copy of a website’s files on your device’s physical hard drive memory. The phrase “webpage is cached” means that a portion of its files have been stored and the browser only needs to load new or updated pieces of the page.

This allows browsers to load pages much faster. Normally, a caching plugin would reduce the load on your server.

Having a website that loads fast is a must in South Africa where internet connectivity is not only limited but sometimes weak.

Top Features of the WP Fastest Cache Plugin

It offers Minify HTML, Javascript, and CSS Files but only for Premium Version.
It uses the Mod_Rewrite method which is the fastest caching method and is supported by all web hosts,
It Performs automatic cache deletion and update whenever an administrator updates a page or posts.
It allows the Admin to block caching on certain Pages or Posts.
It can set Cache Expiration and Timeout values.
It has a separate Caching rule for Mobile Devices Premium feature and logged-in users.
It supports SSLs and CDN.
It integrates well with the Cloudflare service.

#7. UpDraftPlus WordPress Backup Plugin.

Backup plugins should be your topmost priority when it comes to plugins. In case anything happens to your website, you can restore a backup using the backup plugin.

UpdraftPlus is the best plugin that simplifies backups and restoration. It is the world’s highest ranking and most popular scheduled backup plugin which makes it one of the best WordPress plugins in South Africa.

You can back up your files and database backups into the cloud and restore them with just a single click.

You can do backups into the cloud directly to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, UpdraftVault, Rackspace Cloud, FTP, DreamObjects, Openstack Swift, and email.

The paid version gives you more backup options such as Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Storage, BackblazeB2, SFTP, SCP, and WebDAV.

Top features of the UpdraftPlus Plugin

You can schedule automatic backups either hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly.
It also provides automatic local backups of your site and also allows off-site backups to Dropbox, Google Drive, Amazon S3, FTP, Email, and many more others.
It allows you to restore your website anytime with just a single click.

#8. Smush Image Optimizer

The Smush plugin which was developed by WPMU is used to compress and optimize your images. Smush compresses your images without compromising the image’s quality. The plugin helps you save a lot of storage space and improve your website’s performance.

Top Features of the WP Smush plugin

It performs lossless image compression,
It offers automatic image compression on the fly while you upload or attach an image,
It has a manual bulk compression option (up to 50 Images with one click for the free version),
It can automatically correct an image’s dimension,
It can process any image file format be it PNG, JPG, or GIF,
Its Pro Version comes with WebP Support, CDN, and many others.

#9. Ultimate Member

If you want to create a membership website using your WordPress website, then this is the best user profile & membership plugin for WordPress in South Africa.

This plugin makes it easy for users to sign-up and become members of your website. It also can restrict content to be visible to registered members only.

Through Ultimate Member, you can accept payments, sell subscriptions, add beautiful user profiles to your site, and create advanced online communities and membership sites.

Top features of the Ultimate Member plugin

Users can register, log in, and access their profile without knowing they are on a WordPress website.
It allows you to customize the registration fields.
It uses conditional logic to restrict content for members and non-members.
It provides a neat User Account/Profile Page.
You can also extend the plugin’s features using paid add-ons.

#10. WP Mail SMTP

WP Mail SMTP is a powerful plugin that improves WordPress email deliverability. It was built to solve the all-too-common problem of emails from WordPress sites going missing or ending up in spam folders.

Once you have WP Mail SMTP setup, forget about emails vanishing from your site. You can also use it to fine-tune your site’s email notifications and keep a log of the emails you sent out.

Top features of WP Mail SMTP

It has easy Integration with Popular Email Services – WP Mail SMTP works with a wide range of reliable SMTP / email delivery providers, such as Gmail/G Suite, Office 365, Amazon SES, MailGun, SendGrid, Sendinblue, SMTP.com, and Pepipost.
It manages WordPress Emails and Notifications – WP Mail SMTP lets you turn off the emails you don’t need.
It has an email Log – With WP Mail SMTP, you can keep track of all the emails sent through your site. If you’re concerned about missing something, or not sure if emails are going out correctly, this can give you peace of mind.
It has a white Glove Setup – Not very techy? No problem. If you are not a tech person don’t worry, the WP Mail SMTP team can set everything up for you. You can also reach out to the support team when you need a hand at any point if you decide to do it yourself.
It has full Documentation – With step-by-step documentation and tutorials in plain English, it’s really easy to get WP Mail SMTP set up and tweak it to work exactly how you want it to.
It has a top-Rated Support Team – The WP Mail SMTP support team is on hand to answer all your questions when you need help. Just reach out and they will gladly walk you through everything, at your own pace.
It’s built for Performance – WP Mail SMTP does not slow down your website. It’s designed with performance in mind, using modern best practices to make sure your site keeps running smoothly and efficiently.

Conclusion

There are so many plugins available for you to download. We have covered the WordPress plugins we consider the best and must-haves plugins in South Africa.

We hope the above plugins will help improve your site’s look, functionality, and overall performance leading to more conversions.

Only install the plugins you need. Too many plugins can slow down your website.